Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Friday, January 30, 2004Learning New Tricks
My friends Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman at The Rhythm of Business make a persuasive case that
- To be a skilled entrepreneur is to be a skilled learner.
- We can learn how to be more effective learners, so entrepreneurship is something that can be taught.
That's all good news for the legions of entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) that are emerging across the country and the world. If their goal is to catalyze effective entrepreneurship, ESOs must be in the business of helping aspirants to learn how to learn.
The bad news is that learning can be a very slow process in the messy social world characterized by ambiguity, delays, game playing, selective perception, bias, misperceptions, poor reasoning, and defensive routines. Witness the 264 years (!) it took to adopt citrus use to prevent scurvy:
- Prior to the 1600s, scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) was the greatest killer of seafarers -- more than battle deaths, storms, accidents, and other others combined.
- In 1601, Lancaster conducts controlled experiments during an East India Company voyage: The crew on one ship received 3 tsp. of lemon juice daily; the crew on three other ships did not. At the Cape of Good Hope 110 out of 278 sailors had died, most from scurvy. The crew receiving lemon juice remained largely healthy.
- In 1747, Dr. James Link conducts a controlled experiment in which scurvy patients were treated with a variety of elixers. Those receiving citrus were cured in a few days; none of the other treatments worked.
- In 1795, the British Royal Navy begins using citrus on a regular basis. Scurvy wiped out.
- In 1865, The British Board of Trade mandates citrus use. Scurvy wiped out in the merchant marine.
Source: Sterman (2000)
Ideas and social practices sometimes spread in a manner that appears analogous to a virus. However, it's a mistake to take the analogy too far. People don't adopt new ideas unless they want to. Consequently, we shouldn't underestimate the resistance to the kind of behavior required for effective entrepreneurship. To learn, we have to be willing to risk being wrong. In business, that means being wrong in public. That's not any easy practice for most of us to embrace.
I hope that it takes less than 264 years to get there.
